Kenya

To find the house that Alan Donovan built, drive a few miles southeast from the heart of Kenya's traffic-snarled capital and pull onto an abruptly quiet road toward the savanna. The African Heritage House, which overlooks the great, still plain of Nairobi National Park, is both a trove of a continent's aesthetic richness and a mausoleum of its extinct wonders. Donovan, 70, was born in Colorado and attended UCLA but has lived in Africa since the U.S. State Department sent him to Nigeria as a relief officer in 1967.

To find the house that Alan Donovan built, drive a few miles southeast from the heart of Kenya's traffic-snarled capital and pull onto an abruptly quiet road toward the savanna. The African Heritage House, which overlooks the great, still plain of Nairobi National Park, is both a trove of a continent's aesthetic richness and a mausoleum of its extinct wonders. Donovan, 70, was born in Colorado and attended UCLA but has lived in Africa since the U.S. State Department sent him to Nigeria as a relief officer in 1967.

The crescent moon of the railway track divides the slum, a metal slash in the tumble of rusted tin roofs, stinking channels of sewage and narrow paths where children play with toys made of scraps of wire and rubbish. A band of youths hangs about on the track, perhaps slum hoods and their girls. Closer, you make out the boy among them. He looks tense, surrounded. Closer still: He wipes his hands over his face, as if washing off anxiety. One of the bigger youths totes a grubby supermarket bag. Gently, as if lifting out a loaded gun, Victor Onuoch produces a video camera.

When Yon Meakchan isn't converting publications into electronic form for customers such as Stanford University, he pedals his bicycle 10 miles south from his office to the rural edges of this city of 2 million people to help his family, pulling weeds in rice paddies, tending to banana trees and wading into a murky river to bathe oxen. "Poor people work very hard," said Yon, the eldest of eight children who grew up in a bamboo and thatched-roof house. "If they want to buy nice clothes or a motorbike, they can't.

Rose is 17 months old. She weighs 15 pounds and looks the size of an American 5-month-old. She cannot sit up, walk or speak. She has the toothpick limbs and saucer eyes of the malnourished and the dull skin of dehydration. In another corner is Caroline, a waifish 9-year-old who sleeps in a crib. She is a whispering, otherworldly child, pretty and fragile. Her parents are dead, and she is severely malnourished. I have just given her a teddy bear and accessories from a bag of toys we brought from the U.S. When I gave her the bear, she looked at me in disbelief.

Re "First aid for Kenya," editorial, Jan. 4 This editorial rightly warns of possible spiraling ethnic violence in Kenya, and your call for aggressive international mediation of its presidential election dispute is certainly prudent. Already, hundreds of Kenyans have lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. Those fomenting ethnic strife in Kenya should be put on notice that the world is watching. All sides -- especially President Mwai Kibaki's government, which apparently conducted a fraudulent election -- must be flexible to lessen tensions.

Your State Department advisory regarding robberies in Kenya and in particular the Masai Mara (News & Briefs, March 8) troubled me because I have just returned from this wonderful country and its popular game park for the second time. Never did I feel threatened nor did I ever feel suspicious of any Kenyan. To the contrary, they (made me) feel very special and treated me with the utmost respect and courtesy. I take with great offense that Kenya was singled out as an "alert" to tourists as I uphold East Africa as my favorite, special corner of the world.

The United Nations has just reported that nearly 3 million people in Kenya desperately need food to avoid starvation. This was reported in your Feb. 3 paper in a small news item. Since the United States appears to have the motivation and capability to participate in worldwide military, finance and trade actions, would it not be appropriate to test our current humanitarian capabilities? JAMES R. ANTONOW Fullerton

Kenyans weary from decades of misrule have approved a new constitution designed to curb presidential powers and allow the removal of corrupt or incompetent politicians, according to final results released Thursday. After years of waiting for change, voters discarded the constitution in place since Kenya gained independence from Britain in 1963, a document blamed for many of the nation's ills, such as cronyism and tribal favoritism in politics and the bureaucracy. The new constitution curbs the sweeping powers of the president by devolving power to the regions and establishing a bicameral parliament.

It must have meant to be humorous, the article "Footloose in Kenya--A Rite of Passage" (April 24), by Beverly Beyer and Ed Rabey. The first five inches of the article are entirely taken up with describing the excruciating rite of circumcision for 16-year-old Masai youths. This is immediately followed by "How to Get There" and "How Long and How Much." Is it anticipated that there is an eager following for travel with such an objective? Wow! Now I really understand the meaning of outre.

You Will See Fire A Search for Justice in Kenya Christopher Goffard W.W. Norton: 317 pp., $27.95 The body of John Kaiser, an American Catholic priest, was found in a ditch outside the Kenyan market town of Naivasha on Aug. 24, 2000. A gunshot had blown off the back of Kaiser's head. He was 67, and for years he'd been a thorn in the side of Kenya's violent and corrupt ruling regime. A supposedly thorough FBI investigation concluded that Kaiser, with a history of manic depression, had killed himself.

Its name means "multitude," and it may be the biggest and most dangerous gang in the world, a thuggish army terrorizing Kenya with extortion rackets and gruesome punishments. Much about the organization called Mungiki is cloaked in myth and speculation, not least the estimate of sworn members -- some say 100,000, others say millions. Those claiming to be defectors, however, say the gang relies on strict discipline and tolerates no dissent. "If a member disobeys, they would cut that member's head off and put the head in public view at the place where they had a problem with the member," an alleged former member said in a statement to prosecutors at the International Criminal Court.

In the month since Kenya invaded southern Somalia, one government official has urged negotiations with Al Qaeda-linked militants the army is attacking there. Another ruled out talks. A spokesman said the incursion was months in the planning. The army commander said the decision took just days. There is greater accord among officials that the country's first foreign war in its nearly 50-year history is likely to be a long slog, and among critics that Operation Linda Nchi, or Protect the Nation, is a risky venture of more value to the U.S. than to Kenya.

Kenya's government has made an urgent appeal to the Obama administration for the Pentagon to provide intelligence and logistical support to Kenya's faltering month-old military operation in Somalia against the Shabab, a powerful Al Qaeda-linked militia. Administration officials are considering the request, which came through the State Department, to provide military surveillance and reconnaissance that could include imagery from drone aircraft. Such aid would represent a significant expansion of U.S. involvement in the chaotic East African nation.

In Nairobi's "Little Mogadishu" neighborhood, paranoia drifts in the air, mingling with cooking smells and the stink of open drains. "I'm living in a world of fear," says Ahmed Ali Ibrahim, a tall, skinny 35-year-old Somali refugee with a shrapnel scar under his skull cap. "I can't walk about freely. " Ibrahim says he fled his homeland for Kenya, seeking safety after being wounded last year in a grenade attack on African Union peacekeepers by the Shabab, the Somali militant group linked to Al Qaeda.

The commander of Kenya's defense forces declared Saturday that his troops would remain in neighboring Somalia until the threat from the militant Islamist militia Shabab is eliminated and Kenyans feel safe. Given the messiness of other countries' incursions in Somalia, the vow by defense forces chief Gen. Julius Karangi suggests that Kenya's first military adventure since independence nearly half a century ago could be a long one. In 1992, U.S.-led forces launched Operation Restore Hope, which led to the "Black Hawk Down" catastrophe of October 1993, in which 18 U.S. troops were killed and the bodies of some of them dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

SILALI, Kenya — Soitanae Ole Kyoiogo watched helplessly as his treasured cows dropped dead in the drought, one after another, until only two survived from a herd of 50. Desperate to feed his family, he turned to the only source of wealth he had left: his daughters, ages 8 and 9. The 47-year-old Masai father arranged to marry the girls to a pair of local men in exchange for three cows per child, plus some blankets and cash. It's one of the saddest side effects so far of an East African drought that has killed dozens and is threatening millions more with hunger.

The Kenyan capital was hit Monday by two blasts apparently aimed at civilians a little more than a week after government troops were sent into the country's war-torn neighbor, Somalia. One person was reported dead and more than 20 were injured in the attacks. No one immediately claimed responsibility. But a spokesman for insurgents with the Shabab group last week warned that the group would cause violence in Nairobi if Kenyan troops were not withdrawn. In the first attack, a grenade strike at a bar in downtown Nairobi early Monday injured about 12, with most suffering cuts and scratches.

A 66-year-old Frenchwoman who was abducted by a band of Somali gunmen at the beginning of the month has died in captivity, French authorities announced Wednesday. Marie Dedieu, who used a wheelchair, lived in a modest beachfront house on Manda Island in the Lamu resort archipelago on Kenya's northern coast. She was seized by gunmen, thrown into a speedboat and taken to Somalia, a war-torn country that has become a base for piracy. Kenyan authorities unsuccessfully pursued the kidnappers.